Re Eliot:

I think Eliot was abandoned (particularly in America) for Pound and
(perhaps more importantly) Williams.  There is a certain part of me the
feels that the 'line of Eliot' is going to reappear.  There is a part of
that part of me that feels that this time is not too far away.  I feel
that it is high time that poets started reading works like Four Quartets
and the Waste Land as sources of inspiration once more, and not as dry
academic exercises.  One of the reasons, I feel, that Eliot didn't
influence later writers in the way one would expect is because the New
Criticism sprung up around his work and translated it very quickly into
an academic obsession.  This meant that in the period of time where one
might expect to see his influence one instead saw younger poets reacting
*against* his ideas (which probably should have only started around
now).

I'm not sure if I'm making any sense.  I'm probably raving.  My ulterior
motive is that I'm rather a fan of Eliot.  I have (so far) found it hard
to find any of his poetry or his critical ideas that I didn't like.

bob

p.s. - I sent this directly to David by accident.  This is a resend to
the whole list, sorry David for the fact that you will have received two
copies.

On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 23:28, david.bircumshaw wrote:
> Tim wrote:
>
>
> >And as for their 'tradition'. Pound's tradition, or influence or legacy or
> whatever else we can call it, is pretty much confined to those very schools of
> poetry and poetics that this list is supposed to be a tail-end of - not
> exclusively I know, but still. And Eliot, as I've argued before, has actually had
> very little long-term influence on British poetry as a whole.<
>
> Yes, this interesting, Eliot's reputation in his lifetime was somewhere off the planet, and his influence as a critic and publisher
> was enormous, but there's very little you point to as being of, as it were, Eliotic descent. He's rather like a God figure nobody
> wants to engage with. The more prolific Pound, although probably the lesser poet, did leave odd lines of influence. Difficult,
> innit? I think this is part of problem of discussing innovative or avant-garde poetics in terms of British poetry, there is just not
> a coherent school of writing to take one's bearings from, from the outset, if you boil down twentieth century British and Irish
> poetry you have as the two outstanding figures, oh fuck, Thomas Hardy or Yeats, now neither Hardy's perceptual brilliance (vide
> Larkin's take one down to a cul-de-sac) or Yeats' thumping enchanting rhythms and occultist oddities leave one anywhere to go. In
> the background stands the Reverend TSE (who is very vaguely a background to Geoffrey Hill), Wystan chatting away brilliantly in
> whatever verse form you can choose but with even less emotional involvement than Dryden, Dylan Thomas spacing off into rhetoric, Ted
> Hughes being dark about animals in an authentic Yorkshire accent, David Jones being sonorously read by Richard Burton on BBC radio,
> lots of people telling domestic stories, a whole new breed of professional poets who defy any laws of economics, as hardly anyone
> ever buys their professional productions, but they are Very Easy To Read, if you bother, a disorganised avant-garde which doesn't
> even know how to define itself, even in terms of what its against, and as our Greatest Living of course the Famous Seamus, who, in
> his own words, missed 'the comet's pulsing rose'.
>
> Etc etc.
>
> aaargh!!!!!
>
> Best
>
> Dave
>
>
>
>
> David Bircumshaw
>
> Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
> & Painting Without Numbers
>
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 11:49 AM
> Subject: Re: Performance Poetry
>
>
> Rupert,
>
> I want to pick up on a few more things you came back with. I'm not sure how
> you got there, following your defence of 'Benji', but you ended up saying that
> we "now sustain a wholly cerebral tradition from Pound and Eliot".
>
> Sorry, but I find that rather ridiculous, both from the point of view of
> those names and this 'tradition'. Yes, both were cerebral, very learned and
> intellectual, but their poetry was poetry. They used their intelligence in
> conjunction with their emotions etc to produce poems. Those who try to read The Waste
> Land or the Cantos as purely cerebral projects will get very little from
> either. And as for their 'tradition'. Pound's tradition, or influence or legacy or
> whatever else we can call it, is pretty much confined to those very schools of
> poetry and poetics that this list is supposed to be a tail-end of - not
> exclusively I know, but still. And Eliot, as I've argued before, has actually had
> very little long-term influence on British poetry as a whole.
>
> The other thing I want to pick up on is this:
>
> >"Yet, seeing young performer Luke Wright, winner of the Glastonbury Festival
> 2002 poetry slam, perform "hang your friends" recently was wonderful. Cooper
> Clarke and Attila - and that whole doggerel quick fire delivery was broken. It
> was Chris Morris meets poetry. For me, this is real hope."<
>
> I witnessed Luke recently too, and heard him do 'Hang Your Friends'. Yes, i
> was impressed, both by him and his mates in Aisle 16 - or two of them anyway.
> Luke is a brilliant performer and Hang Your Friends is very very funny, his
> best. But some of his other pieces were a lot less cohesive, a lot more sloppy,
> with whole batches of lines that were no more than filler in-between the sharp
> ones. And he did  - I say 'did' and not 'read' - a poem that had the refrain
> 'Sooo Channel 4' which I found to be nothing but surface attitude: a very basic
> and already cliched idea, about Channel 4 being for the middle classes who
> are trying to be trendy, delivered maniacally. So, ok, I loved the manic
> delivery, but that was all, the words could have been anything, meant anything, but
> it was done in the sort of way that said those words, that message, was
> everything. Poetry as scatter-gun - the targets don't really matter as long as there
> are targets - what matters is the grounding of the refrain, the repetition of
> the line that is supposed to give focus and body to whatever nonsense or
> inconsequence lies in-between - slave to a formula. We have got to be able to take
> each poem on its merits, to judge them for their satirical and entertaining
> impact, how much they make us think, how much they resonate. 'Hang Your Friends'
> resonates, makes us laugh and think, while the channel 4 poem says and does
> nothing, unless it is appealing in that formulaic way to a listener who does
> not really care, or does not have the sensors to note the difference, in which
> case it will all be of one anyway. Within the context of performance it does
> not seem to matter, and that is the problem with performance poetry - I do not
> know what the answer to it is. Because the parameters of judgement remain gross
> - loudest, sexiest etc - progress will remain stunted.
>
> Tim A.